Mike Whaley: A lesson we can all learn from kids

It doesn't happen often, but on occasion we experience a sporting moment so decent, honest, genuine — and unexpected — it can take our breath away.

Such a moment happened last week in Farmington.

It was the District 8 Cal Ripken 12-year-old baseball championship between the all-stars from host Farmington and Mount Washington Valley. Farmington had just won the first game of the best-of-three championship series by forfeit. MWV, unfortunately, had used one of its pitchers beyond his allotment (six innings every two games). He had pitched into his seventh inning in the top of the fourth with his team leading, 4-2.

Farmington was alerted to MWV's mistake during the inning and filed a protest. The game was stopped, a state commissioner called, and after a 15-minute delay Farmington's protest was upheld and a forfeit declared.

I was upstairs in the score shed behind home plate preparing to cover the second game. Suddenly a half dozen young ball players appeared on the stairwell, their questioning faces peering up. They were from Mount Washington Valley.

My first thought was that they had come, as a last resort, to appeal their tough loss, which was barely five minutes old. I felt sad, but to my surprise something completely different happened.

One of the kids, the spokesman, stepped tentatively up the stairs and said the group had a request.

After what had to be an excruciating loss, it would have been easy, and maybe even expected, for the players to grouse and feel sorry for themselves. After all, it was an adult breakdown that failed to track the pitcher's innings, and had nothing to do with them. Instead, the six players rose above all that. They had come to the score shed to ask if they could sing "Happy Birthday" using the league's public address system to a friend and a teammate's sister.

How nice.

A tournament official handed them the microphone and they gathered in a small circle, like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and sang a slightly off-key version of Happy Birthday, with big, ear-to-ear smiles on their faces.

It took me a few minutes, not long after the laughing, jostling teammates had filed down the stairs, for it to hit me how important and genuine what those boys had just done was.

Sometimes, it seems, there's not enough of it. These players took a painful moment and by their simple display of spontaneous decency turned it completely around.

I am reminded of incidents, mostly adult generated, that do not speak well of youth sports. They are, it should be noted, the exception and not the norm.

Here's a sampling taken from over the past dozen years from Babe Ruth, Cal Ripken and Little League baseball:

Our paper covered a tournament game in Dover. It was a good, tight game that was decided in extra innings. Afterward our reporter asked the coach from the out-of-town team, which had lost, for a comment. He refused.

At another tournament in Rochester, a local team acquitted itself poorly. They lost in the championship to another local team, which had come through the loser's bracket and won both championship games in convincing fashion.

The coach at the post-game ceremony made no positive comment about the opposing team's comeback. He was completely negative and it rubbed off on his kids who started making snide remarks as the other team was introduced. Parents, fortunately, stepped to the plate and quickly and firmly told the players to be quiet.

At a championship in Pittsfield, a local team lost in the final and there was some minor controversy. The local coach couldn't get past it, so before the awards ceremony, he took his son, one of the players, and stormed off, literally peeling out of the parking lot in his pickup truck.

Lastly, at a Dover tournament, the coach of an eliminated local team berated his players for playing so poorly, claiming they had let their town down. The players were 8 and 9 years old.

These are rare, but significant, examples of bad form, and they illustrate what can go wrong with youth sports if adults do not have the proper perspective.

Last week, under the lights in Farmington, a handful of Mount Washington Valley youth baseball players, under extraordinary circumstances, showed how simple it is to do the right thing.

Happy birthday to you.

Mike Whaley is the Sports Editor for Foster's Daily Democrat and the Rochester Times. He can be reached at mwhaley@fosters.com.